Max Haufler, a renowned Swiss actor, was born in Basel in 1910 and initially trained as a painter. He began his acting career on stage and screen in 1936, making his directorial debut in 1938 with "L'or dans la montagne", a film based on Charles Ferdinand Ramuz's novel, starring Jean-Louis Barrault.
Unlike many Swiss actors of his generation, who primarily appeared in Swiss German dialect films and heimat films, Haufler acted alongside notable international actors such as Heinz Rühmann, Gert Fröbe, and Michel Simon in Ladislao Vajda's "Es geschah am hellichten Tage" (1958),a gruesome Swiss child murder story.
For Kurt Früh, the director of classic Swiss films, Haufler acted in "Hinter den sieben Gleisen" (1959),where his performance as the character Barbarossa remained etched in the memories of generations of Swiss people. In 1962, Orson Welles cast Haufler in "Le proces" (The Trial),and in 1965, he appeared alongside Marlon Brando and Yul Brynner in Bernhard Wicki's "Morituri". Haufler's last acting appearance was in Peter Lilienthal's "Abschied".
Between 1937 and 1950, Haufler directed nine feature-length films, but he struggled for nearly a decade to secure funding for his autobiographical movie "Der Stumme", based on the novel by Swiss author Otto F. Walter. After being left by his second wife and feeling overwhelmed by his failure to bring the film to life, Haufler took his own life in his small apartment at Neptunstrasse in Zurich in 1965.
